A new methodology for the altered industry landscape

Music Tech Fest reveals “The Industry Commons” at Slush

Music Tech Fest today announced the launch of a new innovation management methodology - The Industry Commons.

On 24-29 November 2017, a selection of the award-winning 5000+ innovators from its Open Innovation Ecosystem will gather at Slush in Helsinki for the first ever real-time prototyping of Smart Contracts for transversal data-driven applications.

The emergent technological environment of industry has seen a series of radical changes within the last years, blurring the lines between industry verticals, as well as between producers and consumers. Theories of innovation have been instrumental in providing a framework for the development of industrial practices and outcomes but the landscape for innovation has altered and these approaches have not kept pace with the changes they have helped to usher in.

Endorsed as high-level EC policy recommendations at the OI2 Conference 2017 of the European Commission, the Industry Commons is the concrete answer to the key challenges experienced by industry in getting the best out of Open Innovation processes. It places creativity and a worldwide high-level expert community at the centre of innovation to leverage existing industry capabilities and create new and unanticipated markets.

#MTFLabs have evolved beyond the hackathon into methodologies for business innovation with concrete impacts. The labs have resulted in multiple products, patents, and policy recommendations. The resulting incubated projects and startups have received international awards, and individual entrepreneurs have been selected as 35 Under 35 Innovators by MIT, and 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs by Forbes Magazine.

Michela Magas, Founder of Music Tech Fest, CEO of Stromatolite and EU Woman Innovator of the Year 2017:

“Since I wrote ‘7 ingredients to build a successful innovation ecosystem‘ we have scaled our methodology to construct a new model for innovation in the physical internet. The Industry Commons builds a complete value transfer network between state of the art knowledge, R & D and the creation of new, robust creative startups, markets, jobs and growth. It enables ground-breaking innovation across all verticals by breaking industry silos and merging industry expertise, research and interfaces, and bringing them all together in the physical space.”

The Industry Commons provides organisations with the opportunity to integrate their technologies as core components of novel products and services, while providing creative innovators and SMEs a range of previously inaccessible tools and support frameworks. Unambiguous layers of intellectual property embedded within smart contracts preserve the individual intellectual property of everyone involved in the innovation process.

In a series of testbeds, brilliant minds from different areas of expertise of the Music Tech Fest Open Innovation Ecosystem come together to experiment with a large and diverse pool of existing data from industry.

The partnership between Music Tech Fest and The Ocean Protocol Foundation, a decentralised blockchain data exchange protocol, allows all stakeholders to share and monetise data while guaranteeing full control, auditability, transparency and compliance.

The first Creative Testbed will be premiered at Slush Music.

MTFLabs use music as a ‘social glue’. Music provides a creative starting point for innovators during laboratory experimentation and creative thinking as the fuel for an enthusiastic exchange of ideas. The gathering of such diverse experts from different industry verticals and disciplines, and the inspirational vibe at Slush provides the perfect environment for uninterrupted knowledge flows and creative thinking. Artists and innovation experts from a great variety of backgrounds and specialisms will work closely in conjunction with the Slush startup ecosystem to prototype novel cross-sector data-driven applications on Smart Contracts with performance placed at the centre, in order to discover new, untapped markets and business models.

In contrast to the traditional 3-minute pitch, the Industry Commons testbed will culminate in a novel 20-minute performance involving artists, developers, innovators and thinkers, who will invite audiences to experience the effect of experimental new technologies which have been created during the previous 5 days of laboratory collaborations.

The preview performance will be held on the 28th of November, in front of 2,500 attendees of Slush Music, covering music industry representatives, media, startups, investors, artists and creators from over 60 nationalities.

The final showcase will be held on the 29th of November, at the junction of Slush Music and the opening of Slush, which jointly gather 20,000 brilliant minds from all over the world to solve to the world’s grand challenges.

OriginsThe Industry Commons methodology emerged primarily from the European-funded Innovation Action project #MusicBricks, initiated and led by Stromatolite Innovation Lab. #MusicBricks offered a set of interoperable tools designed for digital makers and creative developers. Its purpose was to give innovators easy access to the core building blocks of music. Built upon high-level research coming out of some of Europe’s top research institutions, the technologies were bundled and packaged into simple-to-deploy APIs, GUIs and TUIs that enable creative and technical minds to create new projects, products and physical interactions that had not been foreseen by the technology providers. MusicBricks produced 11 new product prototypes, 5.5million in social reach, one patent filed before the end of incubation, two awards, 5 scientific papers, 2 book chapters, and two sets of guidelines for innovation IP.